Solenoid

by Mircea Cărtărescu

It must have been two meters long, and it was, unmistakably, a human embryo at the age of two months, when you can already see the giant, truncated head bent far over, pressing the face, with its eyes still buried in the whitish, translucid flesh, against the thorax, and the stumpy limbs, with fingers and toes already formed, rising on either side of its trunk, like large Latimeria fish lost anachronistically within our oceans. It looked, furthermore, like precisely this kind of concrete animal, elastic and complete, a saturnine monster that lacked nothing and had no reason to evolve, the kind you could find in swamps full of carnivorous plants, or in warm tropical waters, tangled in marine algae, feeding on ciliated, transparent creatures.

I am in my house on Maica Domnului, where I was yesterday, exploring its undefined number of rooms, and where I will be tomorrow and every day until the end of my life. The dream where I am alone in my world in a minuscule imperfection of infinite, dense night. An unobservable bubble of air inside a pitchy sludge the same diameter as eternity.

Each morning, before opening my eyes, I feel the same anxiety: This again? This is what’s called reality? This is what my life will be: home–school–home–school, with no chance of breaking this vicious and destructive circle? Why was I given, like everyone else like me, a god’s mind, if it had to come with a mite’s body? Why can I think, when I can think of nothing but how I will perish in my hallway, buried in the skin of a creature I will never come to know? Why can I understand everything, if I can do nothing?

art will be belief or will not be at all.

Where did it go, the vertical conduit of human suffering? Who fed on our crying and unhappiness and helplessness and annihilation and mortality? Who enjoyed the crack of our bones, the pain of unrequited love, of the ravages of cancer and the death of the people we love, of burned skin, of torn-out eyes, of exploding veins? Who needed our ill-fated substance as clear as tears, like we needed air and water? I imagined a vertical pipe, like the needle of a syringe but with the diameter of the oldest baobab tree, descending to the center of the earth and feeding there, in the empty, spherical hypogeum, a people of necromancers and telepaths related to bedbugs, ticks, and mites. Hedonists of pain, visionaries of terror, archangels of being crushed alive, kings of destruction and hate

the human madrepore held its breath. The utter silence was frightening, as though never before in the world had there been vibrations that the cochlea could perceive, could resonate with. The world became compact again, without moving parts to rub together to make even the diaphanous sound of breath, even the adhesion of the petal of a blinking eyelid.

in the end belief is no doubt just this: the future seen as though it were the past, as though in complete illumination, frozen in a single movement of the dance, and not as a bouquet of infinite possibilities.

The more details we see, the less we understand, because understanding means penetrating the meaning of the mechanism, and that only exists in the mind of its inventor.

When the master points at something with his finger, the cat looks at the finger, sniffs it, licks it. That is how we understand the Godly: incomprehensible beyond good and evil, lost for us in an unreachable dimension. Religions are, and should be, the mindless contemplation of God’s finger, in our inability to understand that the finger is not the message, it only points toward something else. We think with the ganglion of flesh inside our skull, we are censured by its limitations, just as the fly uses its own ganglion within its world, as the cat uses its brain in its little skull to ask for food and affection from a foreign and incomprehensible creature.

My aim was to discover, even if I had only a slim chance, whether salvation were possible. If the message could pass from one spiral to another, in spite of the tragic differences between worlds on different scales, perceived with other senses, in spite of belonging to different ontological fields, other instincts, other loves and other morals, other paradises and other gods … I wanted to know if the cat would ever look in the direction the finger is pointing. If we would ever perceive the code in the tapping on the cell wall, if we would ever be taken up into the sky from the middle of our snow-filled yard. If we would ever get out of here, ever be saved by being given this day our daily fear.

What was is what will be, we said to ourselves, the sun will rise tomorrow, because it has always risen at dawn, and those before us left their testimony that it rose every day in their time, too. People were born, they lived, they procreated, and they died. Their lives lasted seventy years, or for the strong, eighty. That’s how it will be from here on, as long as the earth shall last. We all see this future woven from millions of examples, strengthened by millions of phantomatic lines. It is as though we could see before our eyes a bridge over a river, but only because it was there yesterday, and in the past, and for dozens of good years ahead. So we can walk across the river with the certainty that we have a firm earth beneath our feet.

Through belief, we see the future and already inhabit it. And we have the power of belief because we are from the future, such that we cannot be saved unless we have already been saved, if we already live on the new earth under a new sky.

No one will be saved if he is not already saved from the beginning of time, not in our ephemeral present in this world, but in our real being conducted in the fourth dimension.

Certainty is always worn away by the flickering coin tossed in the air by our stochastic universe. The coin projected upward, the ghostly globe like a butterfly fluttering toward the ceiling, falls on heads or tails unpredictably, and only with a very large number of throws does the line between the two faces, like the needle on a scale, settle, with ever greater precision, in between the two results. In spite of this statistical equality, no one can ever foretell which way the coin will fall with the next toss.

The coin falls almost half the time on one side and almost half the time on the other. But it is not a disk with only two sides, rather, it is a very short cylinder, hiding another dimension between its faces, hiding its thickness, slight but not completely negligible. Every few thousand or tens of thousands of tosses, the coin lands on its edge, even on a surface as uniform as endless marble. It stays there, standing up, after it twists and turns a while, clinking against the soft surface, fighting against all the statistical demons. Sometimes, very rarely, you wrestle with the angel and emerge unscathed. All our hopes hang from this impossibility, this crack in the world’s enamel, otherwise so unforgivingly uniform.

I unfolded the piece of paper and we both read together, like twins conjoined only at their eyes:

the most obscene act on Earth was to speak from yourself, from your own mind, pretending that a god put words in your mouth. The false prophets were the other subtle painters who put doors on the walls of your cranium. Baroque, gothic, classical, or art nouveau doors, but all with the same property: they never opened.